Captain Henry Avery, also known as Henry Every and Benjamin Bridgeman, was an English pirate, famous for the largest heist in the 1600s and become a wanted man to the world. Making his way to Libertalia, Avery and his group, the Founders, settled and began their own society until Avery's paranoia turned him into an enemy.

His treasure and expedition would be followed by other treasure hunters in the years, starting with Cassandra Morgan, whose children, Samuel and Nathan Drake, picked up and finished it.

While Avery never makes a physical appearance within the game, outside of his skeletal corpse, his influence can be felt in nearly every area that Nathan and Samuel Drake explore to find his treasure, with the legends surrounding the pirate captain serving as inspiration for other greedy individuals, specifically Rafe Adler and Nadine Ross, to locate his stolen fortune to satisfy their own designs and desires.

Contents

Biography

Henry Avery was born on August 23rd, 1659 and joined the Royal Navy later in life. Becoming captain of the Fancy, Avery eventually left the Royal Navy, seeking out riches for gain.

The Gunsway heist

In August 1695, Avery — aboard his ship the Fancy — joined forces with other pirate captains, including Thomas Tew, and sailed to the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb. Despite the fact that Tew had more experience, Avery was elected admiral of the pirate ship flotilla and commanded a total of over 400 pirates.[1] There, they ambushed the Mughal fleet making its annual pilgrimage to Mecca. The treasure convoy was comprised of twenty-five ships including the 1,600 ton flagship Ganj-i-sawai (Gunsway).[1]

The pirates eventually caught the Mughal convoy four or five days later. Only the Fancy, the Pearl (William Mayes), and the Portsmouth Adventure (Joseph Farrell) were present for the actual battle.[2]

Avery's opening broadside destroyed the mainmast of the ship, crippling it in the water. With the ship incapacitated, Avery and his crew boarded. Soon the crew of the Pearl joined them on the deck, and the pirates fought for two to three hours.[1]

Eventually, the Indians surrendered. Avery lost many of his crew in the raid. The Gunsway was carrying nearly £600,000 (approximately worth $18M and £13M) in precious metals and jewels. This made Avery one of the richest pirates ever.

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (2016)

Singleplayer

Founding Libertalia

Avery called on famous pirates of his time, Tew, Want, Baldrige, Bonny, Condent, England, etc. The pirates eventually journeyed to an island near Madagascar, Libertalia. Avery gathered the greatest architects and engineers to build elevators and houses all over the island. In time, Avery had the builders build statues of every founder, and leading the founders alongside Tew.

Battle over riches

Over time, the civilians began to feel cheated that Avery and the other pirates were hoarding the treasure they were taxing and started a rebellion. In response, the pirates had all the treasure moved from the vault and into Avery and Tew's mansion and battled the rebelling civilians, almost killing the entire population. Avery and Tew's greed and paranoia started to eat at their minds and began to distrust everyone. It grew to the point that Avery decided to kill all his allies by poisoning them. Then he and his allies lugged all the treasure to Avery's ship. To make sure no outsider gets to it, the pirates set up booby traps in and around the tunnels leading to the ship. However, Thomas Tew, feeling guilty for being forced to kill his fellow captains, started one last battle, resulting in the deaths of both armies and one final battle in the Fancy.

Death

Avery and Tew battle inside the former's ship, but the pirates eventually killed each other in combat. Dying of their wounds, the bodies were never discovered, rotting alongside the treasure. Samuel and Nathan Drake's search for Avery's treasure, eventually finding against their rival, Rafe Adler. Nathan, Samuel, and Rafe found the ship alongside the treasure room with Avery and Tew's body. Rafe's ally, Nadine Ross leaves the trio to die, as Rafe and Nate battle in a dual, leading to Rafe's death.

Avery's ship eventually was destroyed, leaving his body alongside Tew's in the ocean. However, Sam Drake was able to collect some of Avery's treasure, giving some of it to Elena Fisher.

Multiplayer

Survival

Henry Avery appear in the survival co-op gamemode as one of the supernatural bosses you face (Known as Warlords). In this gamemode he has the power of create clones and to teleport (Like the mystical: The Path of Indra). In survival Henry Avery is called: Henry Avery: Indra's Warlord.

Character design

Personality

Henry Avery was a man who felt it was his right to gain fortune, going by means of theft, slave trading, and even murder to secure his lifestyle and was content, and rather proud, of living his entire life as a wanted man. Although partially viewed as a 'Robin Hood' of sorts and an indicative image of the liberty piracy sought to obtain, this was revealed to simply be a fictional description of the pirate, as Avery was an extremely ruthless, sadistic, violent, greedy, egotistical and power-hungry man, who slowly transitioned into a complete and utter psychopath, willing to commit any crime imaginable to secure his wealth, power, and lifestyle as a free man operating under his own rules and his alone.

Among his most notorious crimes would be the attack on the Gunsway and the robbery of all its treasure, a crime that would also be complimented with sordid and horrid tales of the torture, mutilation, rape, and murder Avery and his crew committed upon the hundreds of passengers, to the point that several of them committed suicide to escape such fates, over the course of several days to find every last bit of the ship's riches. Despite his crimes, Avery was seemingly and extremely keen and passionate about bringing other pirates to a colony where every man was to be seen as equals; a colony he later christened Libertalia. However, Elena speculated that Avery's goal the entire time may have been to entice others to follow him to his pirate utopia, along with their riches, in order to rob them of everything they had.

Despite his violent crimes and nature, Avery was a highly charismatic individual, able to convince hundreds of others join him and even lead a successful mutiny that secured his status as a pirate captain. This was aided by an equally manipulative personality, glimpsed within letters from Scottish monks operating out of the St. Dismas cathedral, detailing that Avery coerced them into giving him full access to their lands under the incentive of gold and spinning tales of himself being a man searching for liberty from the British Empire and intending to bury his fallen comrades within the area. While the monks believed him, Avery was simply searching for ample staging grounds to construct elaborate tests to weed out and find suitable recruits to help build his own empire of Libertalia, using his fascination of St. Dismas as inspiration, while the monk's letter was found beside a pile of bones, implying that the monks did not enjoy their payment for long.

Avery took full advantage of the perception of piracy being a fight for freedom and liberty to convince other pirate captains and their entire crews and fleets to not only follow him, but become secondary armies for his plans and designs of escaping from those who would imprison them and prevent them from securing their freedom and fortunes. However, his lust for freedom was also highly hypocritical as he had no issues in slave trading, abducting others, and even forcing Libertalia colonists to live under his own laws or else face sadistic violence and death. In the end, Avery's 'sympathetic side' was simply a farce designed to recruit others for his cause, taking full advantage of their greatest desires to enable absolute loyalty, and then dispatch them once their usefulness has run its course in order to obtain everything he sought his entire life; freedom, fortune, infamy, power, and an empire of his own to rule until he was ready to reestablish life on the seas once more.

During his campaign to found and build Libertalia, Avery recruited the best engineers and architects of his time to make his pirate utopia dream into a reality and aid him as he built extensive tests to ensure that those who follow him and his founders would only be of the most worthy, sending crosses that contained maps to such tests to other pirates, resulting in many lives lost attempting to accomplish these challenges. When the East India Trading Company sent groups of armed men to apprehend Avery and his followers as they traveled across King's Bay in Madagascar and formed temporary bases, they responded mercilessly and slaughtered every last solider, taking their supplies to add to their own stock. This illustrated Avery as a patient, strategic, intelligent, but ultimately pragmatic and cold leader, who took meticulous steps to ensure that he surrounded himself with ample bodies and did not hesitate to strike down anyone who stood in the way of creating his prime utopia.

After settling in Libertalia, Avery became obsessive, paranoid, and even more ruthless and cruel to everyone around him, lusting to claim all the treasures that were brought to Libertalia for himself. This led to the deaths of hundreds, possibly thousands, as Avery and fellow founders incited a bloody revolt, led by colonists, after they stole everything that was brought to Libertalia, and then quelled it by means of torture and mass murder. During his ultimate descent into madness, Avery made extensive use of the secret tunnels and chambers underneath his massive estate to hold, torture, and murder hundreds of people whom he believed have crossed him in some way, using increasingly sadistic and violent means to end their lives, including mummification, and use their bodies and limbs as decoration or traps.

Avery's increasingly lack of trust in others led him to set more and more traps around the island, kill the other founders with poisoned wine, command his remaining followers to flood New Devon by destroying the dam to wipe out the last pockets or resistance, hide his stolen treasure in preparation for leaving the island, planning on abandoning his society in ruins and escape with all the riches for himself, and destroy all ships on the island to prevent anyone from following him. When adventurers Nathan Drake and Elena Fisher learned of Avery's cruel tactics, they became under the belief that the treasure was not worth it, as other would-be treasure hunters had their lives claimed by Avery's traps or by similar obsession, paranoia, and greed. Even Nadine Ross believed those who seek his fortune were doomed for death, looking at Captain Avery and Tew's corpses as she told Rafe Adler.

Avery was not a modest man by any means and took every opportunity he had to showcase his wealth and power, developing an ego as large as the treasures he stole and secured throughout his life. Avery constructed massive statues in his likeness in not only every area of Libertalia, but also in the various strongholds he used as temporary bases of operation, and commanded a considerable amount of respect from his followers and fellow founders. Avery would even go as far as to frame a copy of the proclamation that warranted for his capture as the most wanted man in the world within his lavish estate, feeling immense pride in having secured such a notorious reputation, regardless of the actions taken to gain such infamy. It is this immense narcissism that likely contributed, if not dictated, Avery's belief that he could do no wrong and he alone was worthy of all the riches brought to Libertalia, which he similarly viewed as his creation and his alone.

No matter how many crimes he was prepared to commit: torture, dismemberment, murder, genocide, abduction, rape, theft and piracy, Avery refused to find fault within himself. Such was his obsession with St. Dismas, the biblical figure who was crucified next to Jesus and, although a thief, was commonly viewed as a good man, which Avery likened his own self-image; that of a "penitent thief". This was also reinforced by the fact that throughout his pirate lifestyle, Avery never pillaged nor murdered "non-British heathens", or at least claimed not to, and it was presumably this misguided self-awareness that only worsened, turning Avery into a cruel, murderous, tyrannical overlord as his hold over Libertallia and the Founders' treasure outstretched.

In the end, his ego, greed, and obsessions would destroy his once prime utopia, end the lives of thousands of his fellow pirates and colonists, and ultimately seal his own fate in a bloody struggle with Thomas Tew over the ownership of the treasure of Libertalia.